I wouldn't blame the static type system; this is more of a language design decision of its own. IMO, F# does it this way because ML did it this way. I think it'

I wouldn't blame the static type system; this is more of a language design decision of its own. IMO, F# does it this way because ML did it this way. I think it's more of a cultural norm than a technical decision. There is a certain theoretical purity to requiring ordered declarations across a whole project. It's valuable to compare F# against C++ here. F# and C++ both require ordered declarations within a file (while C# and Java do not), but F# requires the files themselves to be ordered, too, while C++ does not. Both are statically typed languages. C++ avoids requiring a file-level order by defining file-level compilation units and a system for importing and exporting symbols between compilation units to allow each file to be processed separately with the imports/exports resolved during a final linking phase. There's complexity involved in accomplishing this. F# has not done it; an F# project is the same as concatenating all of the source files together, and thus declarations must be ordered across files just like they are within a file.